This summer’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival opens with a bang. More than a few bangs, in fact, and a witch’s soul-shattering scream introduce the visceral tragedy of Macbeth in one of the most intense productions ever staged at Bard.

Kicking off Bard’s gender-conscious 29th season, powerful women — three “weird sisters” and a wannabe queen — motivate Macbeth with his warped sense of toxic masculinity, ambition and injury to carry out his terrible atrocities.

Director Chris Abraham’s satisfying production hits many high notes, though sometimes sacrificing clarity and Shakespeare’s great dramatic poetry for naturalism and theatrical noise.

Ben Carlson and Moya O’Connell are excellent as the Scottish couple who overturn the natural order only to find themselves irrevocably haunted and ultimately destroyed by it. A strong Bard company provides stalwart support.

The witches’ prophecy that Macbeth will become King plants the seed of regicide in a man whose first soliloquies reveal innate morality and “vaulting ambition” warring within him. Carlson’s clear diction reflects a character who thinks carefully through the implications of his actions.

It takes Lady Macbeth to push him over the edge. When she learns that King Duncan (Scott Bellis) will spend the night at their castle, she practically explodes with negative energy. O’Connell plays her as a woman possessed by something very nasty, quivering with evil spirits she seems to inhale from the air, so intense we can’t always make out her words.

Even after Macbeth murders Duncan he still suffers from what she scornfully considers a deficit of manliness, too much “milk of human kindness.” But not for long. Once he’s tasted blood, Macbeth won’t be able to stop. “Blood will have blood,” he says, knowing he’s damned.

He’ll arrange to kill his friend Banquo (Craig Erickson), the witches having prophesied that Banquo’s heirs, not Macbeth’s, will be the future kings. Carlson is brilliant in his proposition to Banquo’s murderers and at the subsequent dinner where Banquo’s ghost haunts him.

Then he’ll slaughter the wife (Lindsey Angell) and children of another former ally, man-of-conscience Macduff (Andrew Wheeler), who has fled to England.

By the end, despite putting up a half-hearted fight, Macbeth dies in nihilistic resignation. Carlson beautifully modulates his sense of life as a pointless “tale told by an idiot.”

Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth has developed a conscience despite herself. In the sleepwalking scene O’Connell spectacularly punctuates her attempts to wash Duncan’s invisible blood off her hands — “Out, damned spot!” — by frantically beating her entire body as if it were on fire.

Other moments of great theatrical intensity include the covens of the creepily electric witches (Emma Slipp, Harveen Sandhu, and especially Kate Besworth) and Wheeler’s anguish in articulating Macduff’s primal reaction to the news of his family’s murder.

Though the actors are miked, the realism of Carlson and O’Connell’s highly physical scenes together sometimes results in the dialogue getting smothered by the blocking. The worst culprit in this regard is the overuse of kettle drums for dramatic effect in Owen Belton’s sound design, often drowning out dialogue altogether. Abraham should trust his fine actors and Shakespeare’s brilliant writing to heighten the drama.

A grey-brown palette dominates Christine Reimer’s period costumes and Pam Johnson’s two-level stockade set. The blood of Macbeth’s victims, and finally his own, provides the colour of ambition gone terribly wrong in this marvellous play.

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